Nelson exiting OSI presidency with non-proliferation swan song?

Summary:The Open Source Initiative -- the organization whose seal of approval counts most on software licenses that say they're open source -- has got its fair share of challenges ahead of it. According to a report by News.

The Open Source Initiative -- the organization whose seal of approval counts most on software licenses that say they're open source -- has got its fair share of challenges ahead of it. According to a report by News.com's Stephen Shankland, the OSI's President Russ Nelson has floated a proposal to keep a lid on the proliferation of licenses that now bedevils the open source community. As of the annointment of Sun's recently submitted CDDL license, the total number of such licenses has risen to 58, and there's little to keep that number from going up. One problem is that once the OSI began its practice of approving vendor- and project-specific licenses, it couldn't stop without being accused of discrimination on subjective grounds.

I've already written about why proliferation of open source licenses is problematic for the open source community, and the OSI clearly agrees. But now comes a twist. Amidst a bit of controversy, Nelson, who was only installed into the OSI presidency one month ago, may be stepping down, according to my sources.